Russia announces civilian evacuation from annexed Ukraine city

Russia announced the evacuation of civilians from a key southern Ukrainian city on Tuesday as it acknowledged the situation for its troops on the ground in Ukraine was “tense” in the face of a counter-offensive.

General Sergey Surovikin, who has been in charge of operations in Ukraine for the past 10 days, said the army was preparing to evacuate civilians from the city of Kherson.

Kherson is one of the four regions in Ukraine that Moscow recently claimed to have annexed.

It was the first major Ukrainian city to fall to Russian forces after the war.

But Ukrainian forces mounted a counter-offensive in the south towards the end of the summer and have been pushing increasingly closer to the city.

“The Russian army will above all ensure the safe evacuation of the population” of Kherson, Surovikin told state television Rossiya 24, describing the situation as “very difficult”.

Ukrainian strikes targeting civilian infrastructure “create a direct threat to the lives of residents”, he said.

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The Russian military commander also accepted that the situation was “tense” for its troops in Ukraine, who have suffered several major setbacks in the east and south.

“The situation in the area of the special military operation can be described as tense,” Surovikin said.

“The enemy is not abandoning its attempts to attack Russian troop positions,” he added.

Russian forces earlier on Tuesday claimed to have retaken territory from Ukrainian troops in the eastern Kharkiv region.

It was Moscow’s first announced capture of a village there since being nearly entirely pushed out of the region last month.

Ukraine warned on Tuesday of an emerging “critical” risk to its power grid after President Volodymyr Zelensky said that repeated Russian bombardments had destroyed one-third of the country’s power facilities as winter approaches.

Russian attacks rocked energy facilities in Kyiv and urban centres across the country, causing blackouts and disrupting water supplies, a day after the capital was bombarded with a swarm of suicide drones.

“The situation is critical now across the country. It’s necessary for the whole country to prepare for electricity, water and heating outages,” Kyrylo Tymoshenko, the deputy head of the Ukrainian president’s office, told Ukrainian television.

The strikes in the early hours of Tuesday hit Kyiv, Kharkiv in the east, Mykolaiv in the south and central regions of Dnipro and Zhytomyr, where officials said hospitals were running on backup generators.

Drones also bombarded Kyiv on Monday — the second in a row — leaving five dead, officials said, in what the presidency described as an attack of desperation after a string of battlefield losses.

Kyiv on Tuesday also accused the Red Cross of “inaction” over its prisoners held by Russia, saying a lack of visits to detained soldiers and civilians meant they were vulnerable to being tortured.

Many towns and cities in the Zhytomyr region, west of Kyiv, and parts of the city of Dnipro in central Ukraine were without electricity, while power was restored to the southern city of Mykolaiv after strikes overnight.

Investigators said they were questioning the pilots of the Sukhoi Su-34, who managed to parachute out of the plane before it crashed on Monday evening into the nine-storey building, engulfing it in flames